Did you end up ordering the book? I received it today and thumbed through it quickly to see an example of plane fakery and a building being inserted into a photo. I didn't see anything interesting on American fakery, but maybe i just missed it, being in a hurry.

EDIT: Here's an interesting (obvious) selection:"..we can tell it is a montage because of its depth of field. When objects both near and far, are in perfect focus it is a good bet that at least two photos were used in its creation"

sublimity wrote:EDIT: Here's an interesting (obvious) selection:"..we can tell it is a montage because of its depth of field. When objects both near and far, are in perfect focus it is a good bet that at least two photos were used in its creation"

This image immediately came to mind

Well it is not so simple because the alleged photographer of the ISS is not "near" it: it is imagined as miles away in the soyuz and using a tele. The final result should be compared to that of showing a landscape in focus, with the moon in the sky background also in focus. Those effects do not necessarily require a montage. (Not to imply the ISS picture is real, of course).

nonhocapito wrote:Well it is not so simple because the alleged photographer of the ISS is not "near" it: it is imagined as miles away in the soyuz and using a tele. The final result should be compared to that of showing a landscape in focus, with the moon in the sky background also in focus. Those effects do not necessarily require a montage. (Not to imply the ISS picture is real, of course).

You're right. It isn't proof of fakery, I just don't get a true feeling from the image. I guess a better example would be the supposed 9/11 footage, where the helicopter skid and distant scenery are both in perfect focus.

The ISS Shot main is fake….The ISS orbits from 325 km –The ISS is in focus so I gather the lowest Hyperfocal distance lowest would be, 325 KM.Check out the fake google earth background” You can see the color of tiny patchwork fields.

Now compare it with so called "real" ISS footage from 350 KM Lowest orbit of the ISS altitude orbit…

I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking a look at something I managed to capture last year that I haven't had time to look at. It is meant to depict the "Hudson crash". It is a big poster, as tall as a person. I was trying to figure out a way to scan it at high resolution, but it turns out to be too enormous to scan at once. It's one of those bus stand posters they are shoving at us lately - the ones made by Values.com (see my post about Who is Behind Conservative Ad Campaign Values.com? here: viewtopic.php?p=2350280#p2350280 )

A tree fell on a bus stand (yes, trees really do fall all the time in the Twin Cities during storms) which - incidentally - is only being used right now to place adverts in it. When they went to change the poster, I asked the worker if I could keep the original poster inside and he rolled it up and gave it to me.

This is not really all that special for any of you, but it is a particularly important victory for me because I have been seeing these ads all over and they are obnoxious as hell. I placed it on the wall of my residence with explanatory captions on digital fakery. (The power of recontextualizing is a great freedom indeed).

They've printed this ridiculous thing at a ridiculous size and it has ridiculous qualities to it that resemble anything but a real camera taking real pictures of real events. And because it is printed at enormous scale, the cryptography software - the kind they are probably using at Rockwell Collins and elsewhere to subtly mask the CGI techniques they use - is plainly visible. And it really isn't explainable as anything else except a deliberate digital information obscurant.

Just in case anyone is willing to look closer, I will post sections of it scanned at ultra-high resolution and you can see for yourself what I mean:

A zoom-in of the cockpit section (this is the maximum amount of the poster that fit on the scanner without darkening the edges - like I said, this poster is very large.)

Here is the exit door section scanned at 300dpi.

Here is the cockpit section scanned at 300dpi.

Here is the right of the "plane" section at 300dpi, revealing seemingly intentional smudges and obscuring graphics. The jagged obscuring on the "water" is a crease in the poster. However, careful examination of the "water" in any given area of the large poster generally reveals strange behavior of pixels in vertical lines.

Things I've noticed so far:

Every weakness of the human eye is exploited and enhanced for the purposes of:1. excusing the terrible image quality.2. causing people's brains to confuse the digital imagery with direct visual input to the eye.

As such, "dark" areas are filled with randomized warm pixels to simulate the human eye's propensity to obscure dark areas when looking at light areas. Light highlights seem to "glow" with uncanny importance.

The "water" - besides being unlike any water I've ever seen outside of a video game or the 9/11 simulation - seems to be divided into two "surfaces" - the flatter compressed and foreshortened surface in front of the plane and the towering wall-like surface behind the plane. It's almost as if the airplane were a miniature in a green screen movie set, then completely obscured with cryptography software and little people digitally inserted. Although the entire thing could be CGI as well, I just don't know why they would do such a remarkably terrible job of it. I can imagine why.

There are smudges around people where there should be none - implying some kind of additional function to the cryptography that "turns up" or "turns down" general obscuring of any interesting details; and in this case it seems to be turned down. However, I suppose this same technique of software could be used in personal interviews and it could be "turned up" to displace and deform the physiognomy of the speaker and hide their identity.

There seem to be several resolutions working against one another. The airplane is low and the water is high. But there also seems to be some kind of high resolution photoshop filter applied to the entire image. Also, each "large pixel" seems to be made of a mosaic of smaller pixels forming a kind of op-art effect. In addition to that, it scales up as well. The largest pixels are themselves appearing in rounded-square blotches of repeating patterns. Look, for instance, at the cockpit's front and how it is shaded. You can clearly see repeating patterns that should not ever appear in any kind of "compression" or whatever other excuse an apologist could make. Look at any "straight lines" and how they zig-zag along in blocks, as if someone had built the image out of Tetris pieces.

One thing is clear: This is not photography of any sort.

Anything else anyone is noticing?

Here are some more, from more scans I did of the left wing - this initial image is pasted together from two scans:

Where does this inflatable slide actually touch the water in this 300dpi scan? Where is the shadow? What is this thing, actually?

Another 300dpi scan. This time I am focusing on the bizarre appearance of the figures both at their "heads" and their "feet" which seem to be pasted awkwardly over some texture near their "heads" that doesn't appear near their "feet". Their "feet" - and how they are standing - are obscured beyond recognition or recoverable detail.

And please let me know if you'd like me to scan another section of the poster. I can do it up to 400dpi, I think. Just let me know. We now have this ugly thing as a resource for investigating cryptography software. The poster in full (from the disgusting VALUES site, complete with comment section reinforcing the lie, with little but positive spin of course)

Instead of painting outlines and shapes with brush strokes and areas of colour, pointillism builds up the image from separate coloured dots of paint. From a distance, the dots merge and appear to be areas of shaded tones, but the colours have an extra vibrancy from the juxtaposition of contrasting dots.

Due to the limitations of printing and video displays, the true effect can only really be seen looking at an original painting.

Simon, maybe that's not a "twin-headed woman" but the Hudson's Nessie!

A further ELA tool-site now appears to be unavailable...http://www.fotoforensics.com/ has disappeared since Sunday 9 Sep, when they were predicting some scheduled server upgrade.

Not good news...

icarusinbound wrote:Without reaching for tinfoil hats (yet), I notice the Error Level Analysis website http://errorlevelanalysis.com/, run by Image Forensics, is still unavailable. It was unreachable for a while around a week ago, same again a few days back, and now it reports:

Please hang tight whilst we move to a new server!.

Stay tuned for when we relaunch:<enter email address>

Most unfortunate. Any known alternatives?

ps Simon/Hoi, why not offer to host a mirror service? Many users of this site might be willing to subscribe to support this